MadBob

Silly Videos

On the homepage of the Larastrap project (already mentioned many times in this blog) I've just dropped a short introduction video. The audio track has been generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech - as I'm too lazy to record an actual voice track, and my spoken English is even worse than

laravel

Squatting Namespaces

Recently I've been involved in an integration of SPID, the SSO system used by Italian public administrations. It is an extension of SAML (an OIDC implementation was supposed to exist, until mostly political issue raised during the deployment...), and the reference PHP implementation was built on top of the popular

javascript

Acrobatic Chart Labels

The web designer of a client of mine has been bold enough to design a multiline, multistyle label for the legend of a chart. And, as charts (and legends) are generated using a commodity JS library, the issue has been to enforce such hardy design. Luckily for me, the JS

laravel

Password Hard Reset

As it happens quite often to enforce by code, in a Laravel application, a password reset for a user (e.g. when manually creating a new user from the administration panel, and the new password has to be choosen by the user himself), and every time I have to dive

laravel

Get Another Text

Years ago I had the questionable idea to ignore the native Laravel localization features and adopt the more supported Gettext way, involving tools to automatically extract strings from the code and populate files in a widely recognized format. It seems I lost my bet: the Laravel native format got more

javascript

Touch to Zoom

Working on a Linux t-shirts e-commerce, I added a simple "hover-to-zoom" feature on the main image displayed in each product's page (this one, for example): it is possible to just hover the mouse cursor to obtain a larger image, which moves accordingly to the mouse movements. Nothing new, here: it

hack

Playing with Semantic SEO

I'm building a tool for Wikipedia trends analisys, and in the latest days I've introduced a feature intended - first of all - to myself. Here and there I've read about "Semantic SEO", which can be summarized in "Provide a semantic context for contents" using explicit references to well known

fediverse

Automate Mobilizon

As I'm hacking a Mobilizon instance to push into the fediverse events fetched from different sources (e.g. the ticket selling platoforms popular in Italy, like VivaTicket), I have to put together some PHP script to automatically interact with the poorly documented Mobilizon API. Even for the first step -

laravel

Destroy the (Laravel) Environment

Context: I have a Laravel multi tenancy application, with different .env files loaded according the current accessed subdomain and containing many parameters (the database configuration for each instance, but also many other items). This works when you access the PHP application via web, and booting the app from scratch at

hack

Happiest Birthdays

On TrendingOnWiki there is a set of pages dedicated to the most relevant birthdays for each day, where "most relevant" is determined by the number of mentions each person has on Wikipedia. Those informations are extracted from Wikidata - more exactly from Semantic Builders, previously mentioned here, as the SPARQL

php

Face to Face

Finally, I've found at least one actual use for an AI-powered tool. Even if this particular use case is absolutely not a new one. On TrendingOnWiki - a website monitoring trending topics on Wikipedia - I use images took from Commons to enhance pages. Usually photos of people. In all

laravel

Parametric Interface

I want to share the following recent experience for a little proud. In GASdotto - my main open source project - I heavily use Larastrap, my own library of Bootstrap5 components for Laravel Blade. Actually, Larastrap has been implemented in the first instance as a derivation of GASdotto's internals. Among

hack

The Wikipedia Graph

I've spent the latest days playing around categories in Italian Wikipedia, in the aim to chart them and get a visualization of a semantic graph composed by more than 440K nodes. I've not reached any acceptable nor useful result, but it is worth to document what actually worked and what

laravel

Little Small Laravel Components

Tonight I had the good idea to profile (using this package, really suggested) Larastrap, my heavily opinionated library of Bootstrap components for Laravel. And I was surprised to find that most of the time was wasted in Illuminate\View\FileViewFinder::findInPaths() function. With a bit of investigation I landed on

laravel

Laravel Catch All Relationship

Sometimes you want a "catch all" relationship in your Laravel model. The most common case is the "admin" User able to access all entities of a given other model, with no explicit belongsToMany or hasMany relationships described in the database, while other Users can access only assigned entities. Of course

laravel

Lazy Tagging Outgoing Email

I used to send my transactional email using AWS SES, but more recently - due some annoying problem with the access to AWS - I moved away to land on SendInBlue. Good service, based in Europe (GDPR FTW!), already integrated with the Symfony Mailer - and, by extension, with Laravel.

bootstrap

Fixing Vite + Bootstrap + jQuery

At some point within the version 9 release cycle, Laravel assets' bundling process has been migrated to Vite: yet another bundler introducing breaks and incompatibilities with many JS packages, just for the sake of the Javascript Fatigue. Among the breaks introduced by Vite, the major one affecting my usual JS

wikidata

Introducing: Semantic Builders

Let say it: Wikidata is super cool. A giant knowledge graph containing lots of informations about people, history, geography, all accessible through a query interface. I use it quite often to retrieve data not accessible anywhere else (here an example), and would like to use it even more often both

laravel

Override Sorting in Eloquent

A very peculiar use case: in a Laravel application, within a complex flow of encapsulated functions which builds different types of Eloquent queries, I always have to orderBy() the created_at timestamp. Except in one situation. The proper way to fix should be to pass a extra parameter to handle

wikidata

Wikidata Logging Wall

I'm trying to setup my own Wikidata endpoint, for fun and profit. It requires lots of resources (do not even try without at least two SSD disks in RAID 0...), but the tools are easily accessible, mostly documented, and there are a few script ready to be executed. There are

javascript

Slide to Paginate

An underrated issue with web pagination is the amount of accessible pages: when dozens are available, the selector becomes too large (and unusable on mobile) or incomplete (as not all pages are rappresented and selectable; sometime, just the previous and the next pages are available). So I tried to replace

bootstrap

Are You Sure?

All we know the confirmation dialog boxes to be prompted to the user - e.g. on deletion actions - and for my Laravel applications I've consolidated an approach a bit more articulated then the classic (and ugly, and poorly informative) confirm('Are you sure?') attached to some submit

laravel

Polymorphic, More or Less

An existing Laravel codebase, quite good but with a low level of abstraction, an a feature already existing for a given context (dates of availability for X) to replicate to another context (dates of availability for Y). At first, a polymorphic relationship would have been the solution to abstract the

laravel

Squeezing JS

I'm working on a website with hard requirements in SEO and performance, so I have to cut millisecond after millisecond to reduce the "Web Vitals" parameters (and in particular the so-called "Largest Contentful Paint"). And I've entered the magical world of automated tools for CSS optimization. Two are the most

laravel

Scroll and Fall

Working on browser unit test with Laravel Dusk I've been hunted for many days on a specific error: "element click intercepted". This is generated in two situations: when "Element FOOBAR is not clickable at point (X, Y). Other element would receive the click" it means that the desired element is